China Syndrome

by Joseph Stromberg

ON
MAKING REALITY CONFORM TO PRECONCEPTIONS

The
whole history of US-Chinese relations could be written as a history
of the delusions held by US policy makers and business interests
about China. What China actually was, or is, entered into
matters very little, aside from occasional US attempts at meddling
and influencing the course of events in China. Most of the latter
ended in disarray and confusion.

Sharp-eyed
Yankee traders developed an interest in the fabled
China market already in the 18th century,
even before we won our independence from Britain.
The notion of the China market grew and grew
throughout the 19th century. Missionaries
did a rough head count of the zillions upon zillions
of Chinese and saw enough potential converts to get
all the missionaries into heaven, bar none. Merchants
considered that if every Chinaman bought a pair of
shoes, that would indeed be a lot of shoes.

Now,
I am not here to make fun of missionaries and merchants.
If they wish to pay for their own efforts and take
their own chances, who could complain? It’s true
that the missionaries were instrumental in creating
a number of sentimental illusions about China and
the Chinese which were of value, later, to other people;
that may be a problem of sorts. It is hard, however,
to separate this case from the common American habit
of fostering illusions about other countries, which
 up against reality  shatter, leaving
policy makers and public intellectuals feeling jilted
and angry. It might have been better not to have had
the illusions in the first place. None of this mattered
until politicians and professors got into the act.

AN
ASIATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION?

Coming
down through the same 19th century, the
Chinese empire had its own problems. The clunky, Confucianist
bureaucratic regime ran up against population pressures
and foreign devils. The Opium War comes to mind, in
which Britain demanded that China say yes to
drugs  that was a simpler time  and acquired
Hong Kong in the unequal contest.

Internal
strains on the regime somehow brought forth, or allowed,
at mid-century the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion in which millions
(six to twenty) of Chinese died. This, at a time when
we were impressed with the figure of 620,000 deaths
(as well we might be) in the Late Unpleasantness of
1861-1865. Covert aid from Western powers helped sustain
the imperial state. After all, the Western imperialists
needed some kind of regime in China to collaborate
with them, even if they did not wish it to be powerful
enough to resist their encroachments in the name of
trade and Christianity.

History
rocks along in funny paths. In the course of sending
aid to the Chinese regime, French forces stopped off
in Indo-China (1858) long enough to lay the groundwork
for their very helpful colonial presence there. This
was so helpful that a lot of Americans of my generation
were killed or maimed dealing with some of the results.
Not that we actually had to be there, but once
someone else has set up a hopeless mess, how could
we ask the United States not to make things worse?
C’est rire.

Anyway,
although the Chinese imperial system survived the
shock of the T’ai-p’ing rebellion, China came under
increasing Western pressure. The Germans, the Brits,
the French, the Russians, and others could count,
too, and they all wanted to sell that same pair of
shoes to every Chinaman. They too had missionaries.
The whole thing became very competitive in a national-mercantilist
and imperialist sort of way.

In
short order, Western powers helped themselves to exclusive
zones of trade and demanded extraterritorial status
for their nationals operating in China (the famous
‘Unequal Treaties’). Reacting to Western intrusion,
the Japanese ruling elite repackaged and modernized
the Japanese state, rose to regional prominence, and
began casting its eyes in the direction of China as
well. The famous Chinese "paranoia" about
which we have heard so much lately may have something
to do with this awkward period in Chinese history.

ENTER
THE AMERICANS....

The
uncompromising German laissez faire liberal Eugen
Richter said of the Weltpolitik (world policy)
of Wilhelm II that it really meant "that one
wishes to be present everywhere, where something has
gone wrong." This could well be the motto of
US foreign policy since 1898. I won’t rehearse things
said here before, except to say that important figures
in the US northeastern political, economic, and intellectual
elite convinced themselves by the late 1890s that
an aggressive politically-backed push into Asian markets
was the sovereign remedy for all that ailed American
society. This became sloganized as the Open Door policy
and became an article of faith and an ideological
assumption of US policy makers despite the policy’s
failure to accomplish much in the actually-existing
China.

Taking
over the Philippine Islands from Spain, as a useful
forward position facing the fabled China market, the
US policy makers threw themselves into the thicket
of competition for economic and political advantage
in China. The famous Open Door Notes (1900, 1901)
were one salvo, which did not, however, have much
immediate impact on the behavior of the European powers
with interests in China. The Americans said, in effect,
let us all compete fairly in all of China (wink, wink:
we shall be the strongest competitor and inherit the
whole market).

Next,
the US participated in the international military
operations to suppress the Box Rebellion. The ‘Boxers’
were an anti-foreign political movement, whose members
attacked and killed Westerners in their enclaves,
possibly with the connivance of the Empress Dowager,
who was getting tired of the foreign devils. Now it
is understandable that once you’ve got yourself entrenched
on someone else’s real estate, you will defend your
lives and interests by force, but that does not alter
the fact that there was more than enough room for
Chinese resentment at the political capitalism of
the foreign powers. This is a very tricky area, indeed,
and if we grant the practical right of the Westerners
to combine forces to defeat the Boxers, we should
soon have to defend some things done by Afrikaners
in 19th century South Africa (as I would
indeed do), and then all politically correct hell
breaks loose, so let’s not go there in any depth.

With
utter cynicism and greed, the victorious Western powers
then imposed on China the most unequal treaty of all,
which included an overinflated indemnity to be paid
out of Chinese customs receipts in silver (the
hard money of the Far East), but not in a lump sum,
of course, but over a period of years so that the
Western powers could draw more interest. The
various intrigues of American railroad magnates helped
provoke a reaction within China’s narrow educated
class, which broadly overlapped with the bureaucracy
itself, leading to the beginnings of the Chinese Revolution
(from 1912). With the overthrow of the dynasty, ineffective
republican rule soon gave way to equally unsuccessfully
central military rule, and then to breakup into local
warlord regimes based on the landlord class. Meanwhile,
the Europeans had taken up their First Global Bloodbath
(1914-1918) and weren’t so much on hand to complicate
things further. Woodrow Wilson even volunteered his
countrymen for the slaughter. A generous man.

ANOTHER
PERIOD OF CONTENDING STATES

Radical
and republican forces coalesced in the Kuomintang
party (old spelling). The writ of the KMT did not
run all that far, and localized conflict between warlords
continued. The fledgeling communist movement sought
to participate in the KMT, but was brutally purged
by Chiang Kai-shek. Thus began the famous Long March.

The
Soviet Union sought to intervene to influence the
political outcome in its big, populous (and therefore
dangerous), neighbor, but in the end tended to prefer
dealing with Chiang, as a pillar of stability. The
Maoists were very resentful of this, even after coming
to power. Matters were further complicated by Japanese
attempts to annex Manchuria, first economically, then
politically from the early 1930s. The presence of
US gunboats well up the Chinese rivers suggests that
US policy makers had a stake as well.

The
outbreak of war between the US and Japan in late 1941
added to Japanese overstretch. The KMT pretended to
fight the Japanese, absorbed large quantities of US
aid and money, and occasionally fought the communists.
The communists fought the Japanese and the KMT, while
building up good will with mild rule and hard money
at a time when the KMT landlord regime set off hyperinflation
and looted and abused everyone in its path. The urban
business classes were driven into the arms of the
communists, hoping for a break as the "national
bourgeoisie" (Mao’s line about them at the time).
Anyone who thought Chiang was a friend of "free
enterprise" had not read his social-nationalist
book.

In
December 1949 the Maoists chased the KMT government
and army off the mainland. The KMT bureaucrats imposed
themselves on the Taiwanese people  in a near
perfect example of a conquest state. Granted, China
had long claimed Taiwan  and any Chinese
government would claim Taiwan, much as certain parties
claim there can only be one Ireland (I am not interested
in the merits of such arguments, here), but, truth
to tell, the actually-existing Taiwanese people were
not consulted when the KMT arrived there.

COLD
WAR FOLLIES

By
now, the heroic and cosmic Cold War had come into
being. One legacy of the KMT, dating from the 1930s,
was the China Lobby. This army of American Congressmen,
publicists, and front men claimed sainthood for Chiang
and constantly pushed US foreign policy in the direction
of greater intervention in Asian affairs. Their story
was almost told in the early 1960s by Ross Y. Koen,
but the Lobby’s lingering influence suppressed his
book, which resurfaced in the 1970s during the Vietnam
business.

There
was also a sort of Maoist Lobby  much investigated
by Joe McCarthy  of academics and others partial
to Mao as an "agrarian reformer." Yes, Owen
Lattimore was undoubtedly a Marxist. Joe McCarthy
was too right, but it did not follow, logically or
pragmatically, that anyone in the US had actually
"lost" China or that it had ever conceivably
been in the power of the US to prevent the Chinese
Revolution from running its course. To that extent,
the famous (rather defensive) State Department White
Paper was correct. In a complex world, Joe McCarthy
and the State Department can both be right,
but not about the exact same things.

DOUGLAS
MACARTHUR AND IMPERIAL OVERREACH

Cold
War begat hot war in Korea. General MacArthur, exceeding
his orders, undertook to annex North Korea. This did
not work out well, and in the meantime, the usual
sloppy and excessive (even hysterical) use of US firepower
right up to the Chinese frontier made the Chinese
Communist government anxious. Now I doubt that communism,
as such, completely explains Chinese intervention
in the Korean War. The Manchu Dynasty, had it still
existed, might have found the US posture, er, troubling.

US
policy makers had never been happy about the Chinese
revolution. Relations froze in Cold War mode for two
decades. From 1949 on, the new bureaucratic communist
dynasty undertook mass murders well surpassing those
of Stalin and Hitler, proceeded to destroy such economic
life as China had, and showed its East-Is-Red ultra-revolutionary
face to the world. The so-called Cultural Revolution
rounded out the world-historically colossal crimes
of Mao and his friends and was, accordingly, taken
up as a great model of human liberation by China scholars
and trendy leftists throughout the West.

The
left-wing China Lobby was in the ascendant, and with
the unpopular Vietnam War, the right-wing China Lobby
was in decline. In the end, Nixon, a politician immune
to being red-baited, "played the China card"
in what began as a cynical great-power maneuver against
the Soviets. Trade grew and we finally had our China
market. The "capitalist-roaders" stayed
on course, unleashing immense increases in productivity
and prosperity.

CHINA
FOR THE CHINESE?

One
might think this was enough for a while. It might
be premature to demand that China do everything our
way on a set schedule. But modesty and self-restraint
are not hallmarks of the US empire in its late phase.
To bring China in line with present US cultural standards,
we would first have to finish the missionaries’s work,
convert them all to Protestantism, and then
tell them it’s all been a mistake, and they must now
take up the cause of scientific materialism and/or
post-modern angst.

I
don’t think we can export our unraveling culture to
China. Better stick with the shoes. The Chinese will,
in all likelihood, modernize Confucianism and be fairly
happy with the results.

I
have said nothing about the current ‘crisis’ nor do
I wish to. The Chinese are said to be

paranoid,
inscrutable, and some other things. Well, frankly,
after their relations with the West, they have their
reasons. We’re not going to remould them all with
scholarships to Yale or Stanford. They are Chinese.
They are, in that respect, foreign. I think
we should accept that, or at least take it into account.

Here
we speak of one of the most ancient and original of
the world civilizations. Its broad outlines were set
long before those of our civilization, even if ours
rests in part on Near Eastern foundations which predate
Chinese civilization by a thousand years. An ancient
script with an enormous literature, Confucian philosophy,
and an indigenous approach to riverine agriculture
 China can draw on all these plus the energies
liberated by the transition to a market economy.

Does
this mean that the Chinese state will often
or always behave well? No. But one might ask if the
US state often or always behaves well. There
may be those who say ‘yes.’ To take on that claim
would involve us in perhaps the deepest of all layers
of American delusion. Those who are not open to
the possibility that there is a US empire and that
empires do bad things, more often than not, are the
most unrealistic of all.

Should
we be realistic about the Chinese state? Insofar as
it matters to us, yes. Should be realistic about the
US state? Even more so. After all, we share some territory
with it, for better or worse.

Joseph R. Stromberg has been writing for libertarian
publications since 1973, including The Individualist, Reason,
the Journal of
Libertarian Studies, Libertarian Review, and the Agorist
Quarterly, and is completing a set of essays on America's wars.
He was recently named the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian in Residence at
the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
His column, "The Old Cause," appears alternating Fridays on
Antiwar.com.

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